College Football National Championship Odds: Brands vs the Ledger

Three weeks before kickoff, Kalshi prices 50 programs for the January 2027 national championship, and the top of its board is a brand portfolio: Notre Dame and Ohio State at 12.5 cents each, Texas at 11.5. A projections reader should immediately ask the question this page exists to answer: which of those prices are backed by last season's ledger, and which are backed by name recognition? We handed the full 50-contract board to a seven-model AI panel, price-blind, with the complete, verified 2025-26 playoff bracket, the August preseason poll, and the 12-team format's structure, then ran a revision round where every seat read the others' anonymized reasoning. The panel agrees with one of the market's three favorites and pays roughly half price for the other two.

The Quick Answer

The panel's champion pick matches the market on Ohio State: 12.5¢ against a 12.7% blend, the closest agreement on the board. The disagreements are the story: the market makes Notre Dame a 12.5¢ co-favorite while the panel pays 5.5%, prices Texas at 11.5¢ against a 7% blend, and sells the 16-0 defending champion Indiana at 8.5¢ when every single seat priced it at 9.2% or higher. The full board, the path math behind the fades, and where the seats split are below.

New to event contracts from the DFS side? Kalshi vs PrizePicks covers the exchange mechanics, and our CFB DFS sims guide is the slate-level cousin of the path logic this page runs at season scale. Our sister site carries an odds-desk read of this same market scored from program tiers; this panel worked from the verified season ledger and the August poll.

The Board

All 50 listed contracts plus the panel's estimate for a champion not listed at all. Prices are exchange midpoints fetched August 9, 2026, 20:23 UTC.

More live boards from the same panel: March Madness 2027 · Florida and Duke 12.5¢ · Super Bowl 2027 · Rams 15.5¢ · NFL awards board

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The Market

Each contract resolves YES if that team wins the College Football Playoff National Championship Game, played January 25, 2027, at Allegiant Stadium outside Las Vegas. The 50 contracts are mutually exclusive, and there is no field contract for the FBS programs not listed, so the panel carried a field bucket anyway; it landed at 1.7%. The 2026 season is the third year of the 12-team playoff: four power-conference champions plus the highest-ranked Group of Six champion enter automatically, seven at-large teams fill the bracket, and the top four seeds skip the first round entirely.

Two timestamps for the record: panel verdicts were generated the evening of August 9, 2026, price-blind; prices were fetched at 20:23 UTC the same evening. One methods note: no clean roster ledger exists in early August, so the panel was explicitly barred from asserting player-level claims and scored the board from the playoff ledger, the poll, and path structure instead.

The Path Math A Projections Reader Already Knows

A championship probability is a path product, not a talent rating, which is the same reason sims beat gut rankings on a DFS slate. To win this market a team must first make a 12-team field, then win either three games with a bye or four without one. That one structural fact drives the panel's biggest fade: Notre Dame is an independent, so it can never win a conference championship, which means it can never earn one of the four byes that go to conference champions. The market's co-favorite is structurally locked into the long path.

"Notre Dame is capped at 6% because, as an independent, it can never earn a first-round bye and must win four games." (DeepSeek V4)

The second structural fact the panel leaned on: the ledger says seeding and brand are soft signals once the bracket starts.

"The three facts doing the most work are the Big Ten's three consecutive titles, the bye structure (three wins versus four), and the ledger's demonstration that seeding is soft — a 10-seed Miami reached the final and a 4-seed Texas Tech was shut out 23-0." (Claude Opus)

Where The Machines Split From The Money

Notre Dame: Market 12.5¢, AI Blend 5.5%

The board's widest gap. The Irish sit fifth in the preseason poll and missed the 2025-26 field entirely, and the no-bye path means their title requires four straight playoff wins. The seats were remarkably tight on this: all seven landed between 5.1% and 5.6%. The market is paying a brand premium the structure does not support.

Texas: Market 11.5¢, AI Blend 7.0%

Same shape, smaller gap. Texas opens fourth in the AP poll, but the ledger shows the Longhorns missed the 12-team field last season while the market prices them third on the board, ahead of the defending champion and two semifinalists.

Indiana: Market 8.5¢, AI Blend 9.9%

The panel's only meaningful upward repricing in the top ten, and the one with the cleanest evidence. A 16-0 champion that won its playoff games by a combined 121-46 sits sixth in the poll, but with the second-most first-place votes, a split the panel read as real uncertainty rather than dismissal.

"Indiana is second because 16-0, a national title, and 14 first-place votes are stronger evidence than a normal No. 6 ranking; I am not treating the defending champion as a novelty." (ChatGPT)

LSU: Market 5.5¢, AI Blend 2.3%

The quiet brand tax. LSU missed the field and opens outside the preseason top ten, yet trades ahead of Texas A&M, Ole Miss, and Oklahoma, all of whom made the bracket and rank higher in the poll. No seat paid it more than 3%.

Ole Miss: Market 2.5¢, AI Blend 3.6%

The reverse case: a semifinalist priced below its ledger. The Rebels beat Georgia in a playoff quarterfinal and return a top-ten poll slot, but trade at 2.5¢ while three teams that missed the field entirely (Notre Dame, Texas, LSU) trade above them.

Where The Panel Changed Its Mind

The revision round tightened the top without moving it: Ohio State's seat-to-seat range narrowed to 12.5-13.0, agreeing with the market's price almost exactly. The interesting moves happened below.

"The Big Ten title path is crowded: the same conference-strength fact that helps them also creates competition for the bye." (ChatGPT, capping Ohio State even while raising Indiana two full points to 10)

Kimi K3 made the round's biggest move, cutting its field estimate by 3.5 points and lifting Ohio State from 10 to 12.5. DeepSeek V4 raised Indiana two points to 10.5, the panel's high. And one seat declined to follow the crowd upward on the champion:

"Repeating requires surviving a Big Ten gauntlet that now includes Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, and Michigan all fighting for the same bye slots." (Claude Sonnet, holding Indiana at 9.5)

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

• Texas Tech (3.5¢, blend 2.6%): every seat's first dark horse. "The ledger shows it earned the 4-seed at 12-1 last season, so the Big 12 champion bye path is proven, not hypothetical." (Kimi K3)
• Clemson (0.5¢, blend 1.3%): "The ACC's title path produced a national finalist from a 10-seed, so its champion needs only a normal season to be live." (Claude Opus)
• Tulane (0.5¢, blend 0.29%): "Proved a Group-of-Six path exists via last year's first-round bid." (Claude Sonnet) The format reserves that slot again this season.

Every Seat's Number

Top of the board after revision, in percent. On a phone this table scrolls sideways; the board above carries the headline numbers.

Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: GPT 83% on 3,225 graded calls · Claude Fable 82% on 450 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 514 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 498 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,307 graded calls · Kimi 83% on 2,285 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,332 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.

Model estimates generated August 9, 2026, price-blind from live fetched data. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money.

Every number in this piece lands in our backtest ledger the day it is generated and gets graded against the January 25 settlement on the public model verdict scoreboard, the same way the Stokastic Sims vs Kalshi ledger grades our sports edges.

What Would Change The Panel's Mind

• September head-to-heads inside the top ten. Five weeks of games convert poll priors into ledger facts; the panel's Texas and Notre Dame fades start becoming falsifiable in the season's first weeks.
• Conference championship weekend. The four byes go to conference champions in December, and the panel's whole architecture prices byes; a Notre Dame 11-1 regular season against this fade would be the exact stress test.
• A ranked September upset of Ohio State or Indiana. The Big Ten's three-peat is the panel's strongest structural prior; early evidence against Big Ten depth moves every number in the top five.
• The first College Football Playoff committee rankings of the fall. The committee's revealed seeding preferences beat the AP poll as a bye predictor, and the panel would re-weight accordingly.

Settlement Timeline

• August 29, 2026 — the regular season opens; results begin replacing priors.
• Early December 2026 — conference championships decide the four automatic bids and the byes.
• December 2026 through January 2027 — the 12-team bracket runs first round, quarterfinals, and semifinals.
• January 25, 2027 — the National Championship at Allegiant Stadium settles all 50 contracts.
• This page re-scores when the story moves; prices above are as of August 9, 2026, 20:23 UTC.

How To Read These Prices

• Eligibility. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook. 18+, availability varies by state as of August 2026.
• Half-cent books at the bottom. Thirty-two teams trade at 0.5¢ midpoints on thin books; quotes there are opinions, not depth.
• Paths over brands. The panel's fades are structural, not scouting takes: no bye means four wins, and a missed field means the poll is the only evidence.
• **Not advice.

The Bottom Line

The market and the panel agree on the champion profile: a Big Ten power with a bye path, led by Ohio State at almost exactly the same number from both sides. They split on what a brand is worth before a single snap. The market pays Notre Dame and Texas 24 cents combined largely for who they are; the panel, working from the bracket that actually happened and the poll voters' own split ballots, pays them 12.5 and hands the difference to the champion the market is quietly underselling. By conference championship weekend one of those reads will look obvious in hindsight, and the scoreboard will show which.

Verdicts generated August 9, 2026, price-blind. Prices as of August 9, 2026, 20:23 UTC. Panel: seven of the panel's eight seats ran this board (ChatGPT, Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4), each revising in an anonymized cross-read; the blend is the simple mean of the seven revised numbers.

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